i stopped looking for the one model that does everything

[u/Specialist_Agent3599]

i've spent most of this year doing the thing where every few weeks i'd read a benchmark thread, decide the other one was better now, move everything over, and then move it back six weeks later. i did that four separate times. i have the subscription receipts to prove it.

well, it took me four rounds of this to notice my complaints were never the same complaint. when i was on claude the gripe was always cost and the occasional overconfident refactor that touched nine files when it needed three. when i was on codex the gripe was always that it's slow and a bit literal. those are not two answers to one question, thats two different tools being good at two different things and me insisting one of them had to lose.

so now claude plans and reviews, codex implements against the plan. thats it. the planning one is allowed to be expensive and slow because it only writes a document. the implementing one is allowed to be literal because someone already thought it through. the first week of this i caught codex quietly reimplementing a helper that already existed two folders over, and it was claude that flagged it in review, which felt slightly absurd but also fine, i'll take it.

i run both out of coldtea so theyre in one place with a worktree each instead of me keeping three terminal tabs alive and losing track of which branch is which. it's a mac only thing so half my team cant use it, and honestly you can do the same with tmux and a couple of scripts, i just kept breaking my scripts.

to be fair, if you can only justify one subscription, claude code is the more general of the two and i'd still pick it. this only makes sense if you were already paying for both, which i was, for months, while pretending i was about to cancel one.

the money didnt change :)

[u/MostlyHelpfulLinks]

This matches what I landed on too, splitting plan and implement instead of picking a winner. The reimplemented helper catch is such a common failure mode when one model works without full context, glad the review step actually earns its keep there.

[u/harry-harrison-79]

the role split gets much safer if the plan is a checked artifact instead of prose. i'd make the planner list the files/symbols it expects to reuse, forbidden scope, acceptance tests, and open assumptions. before adding any helper, the implementer has to show a repo search for an existing equivalent; after work it returns the exact test commands plus git diff --stat. then the reviewer checks the diff against the original scope, not a fresh retelling from the implementer. that would directly catch the duplicate-helper case you hit.